The Gaming Den

Fast scaling by level (including for traps) means that the GM needs to warn you very clearly if you're about to enter the red zone. Poorly organised adventures may not warn the GM well in turn. This shows up a problem in PF2.

Traps are dangerous because a small amount of HP damage is just a waste of time. Unless they're mostly alarms. I'm...with the PF2 designers there actually.

Not much touched on in the thread, a specialised trapfinder and disarmer is vital in adventures with significant traps and has wasted a noticeable amount of character resources in adventures without. That's a problem continued from PF1 and to a lesser extent from D&D 3.x.

Is there any game that actually does traps well?

The problem is the trap scaling is so bad that devoted trapfinders only find the trap 25% of the time and traps usually have a 90-ish percent chance of dropping you down multiple dying ranks and maybe even putting doomed on you.

I imagine that traps like the ones in Indiana Jones, where the player characters are suddenly plunged into a dangerous situation without clever monsters and have to use character abilities and their wits to survive, could be good in a game. Things like arrow traps that just suddenly shoot and kill a party member are pretty much only used on redshirts normally, outside of D&D or Pathfinder.

I was thinking more along the lines of traps for players to use, but good point.

Foxwarrior wrote:Things like arrow traps that just suddenly shoot and kill a party member are pretty much only used on redshirts normally, outside of D&D or Pathfinder.

What about arrow traps that suddenly shoot and somewhat injure a PC (or not), to break up the monster based encounters? That seems a popular approach as well.

Thaluikhain wrote:

Foxwarrior wrote:Things like arrow traps that just suddenly shoot and kill a party member are pretty much only used on redshirts normally, outside of D&D or Pathfinder.

What about arrow traps that suddenly shoot and somewhat injure a PC (or not), to break up the monster based encounters? That seems a popular approach as well.

Generally, that's a bad approach. Let's compare an arrow trap with a monster encounter where the monster teleports in, makes a single attack, then teleports away, never to return. From the player perspective, that's not really an encounter... They mark off some hit points, but there's nothing to engage with.

The best traps (in movies and games) are either totally obvious (in which case interacting with and 'solving' the trap before it triggers is part of the game. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there are two good examples of this type of trap. The floor that requires 'spelling the name of God' and the 'leap from the lion's head' are both obvious (at least to a D&D player). Figuring out what word to spell out is something that players can do to 'solve' the trap, and it creates a way to interact with it besides 'you fall into a pit and take 22 damage'. Clever players may choose to 'bypass' the trap - there's nothing stopping you from climbing across on the ceiling, so having some type of time-sensitive issue can help make those traps more engaging.

The other type of trap that works well is one that involves a time delay. If you step on a 'pressure plate', the ceiling falls and your character dies, that's not engaging or fun. But if you step on a pressure plate and then you hear a rumble and you know 'something bad is happening', but you have a chance to try something, that's good. Temple of Doom offers that with a room of crushing spikes, Raiders of the Lost Ark does that well with the rolling boulder (which essentially becomes a chase scene), and Star Wars does this with the garbage compactor. Both Temple of Doom and Star Wars require someone outside of the trap to disable it, which isn't your best design choice...

Keep in mind that traps need more mechanical description than they typically include. If your players are going to try to stop the crushing ceiling with a skull or crushing walls with a 10' pole, it's important to know how 'strong' the ceiling is. It's very easy to just pretend traps are going to do their thing and CANNOT BE STOPPED, but that's not very satisfying.

Traps can serve a narrative function as well. If you have a treasure that hasn't been 'spoiled', having obvious traps that MUST be overcome can be a reasonable explanation for why nobody has done so, yet, even if they're not terribly difficult to beat. If you know that there's a room that fills up with water, you can survive the trap with water breathing, but it makes sense that a lot of people might not have.

Traps can also be combined with creatures to make them more interesting (see the garbage compactor in Star Wars again). Trying to escape a pit as the walls slowly close on you (like in Army of Darkness is that much harder when a ghoul is trying to wrestle you. In that case the trap creates a sense of impending doom for what might otherwise be an 'easy' monster encounter...

When you're including a trap in your game you should ask yourself how your players INTERACT with the trap. And I don't mean 'have a rogue that finds it' - a trap has to be an encounter that the party engages with to be worth including. How can they turn the trap to their advantage? If they can bypass it without tripping the trap, can they use it against a dangerous foe elsewhere?

The final use of a trap that can be good if used sparingly is as the entrance to the 'next level'. If a pit trap drops you 3 floors but has an exit on the lower floor, it can be a shortcut/bypass some other difficult areas. Players that explore the trap (without falling prey to it) will feel clever. The nice thing about this type of trap is that you really could just have the character 'fall and take 22 points of damage' but they at least get something to engage with it AFTER that. Adding treasure (from prior adventurers) to those types of traps can also make it feel like it was a net positive to 'experience' the trap. It's still better if they can interact with the trap over multiple rounds.

Here's a quick example - the party is walking down a narrow hallway. The entire length of the hallway is a see-saw, secured on one end. As soon as more than half the party is more than half-way down the hallway, it will begin tipping, eventually turning vertical and dumping the party in a pool of acid. The party can realize that moving to the back half will tilt it back down (it's optional whether when it started tipping if the stop on the far side the 'stop' recessed so the see saw now requires balancing on both sides). Now the players have an obvious trap (we're going to fall into acid if we try to just walk forward) and they're 'engaged' as they try to figure out how to keep the seesaw balanced as they move off one at a time...

I can see an arrow trap working in the way a Mario bullet bill works, if you are carefull you will notice it, if you rush without knowledge and are pre-occupied by other things the projectile can hit you.

So an arrow going off and nothing else is bad, but if you've decided to flee from the animate statue into a room you haven't been in, then the arrow goes off, that adds to the overall threat/feel of the area.

In my experience, the most fun traps are the ones that players interact with MTP-style. This is where we got the 10' pole, and why it's been the MVP of many a grognard's old-school adventuring party.

I mean, it doesn't matter what the DC is to find and disable a pit trap because it is always going to be more fun to find it by poking it with a stick and then setting it off by tossing a corpse onto it. The proud history of summoned monsters being sent down long corridors full of traps is one I think deserves to be preserved.

Traps can liven up combat as well, but then it's about forcing the players to go outside of their tactical comfort zone. No one gives a shit about a maneuver or effect that pushes an enemy 10' except on the chess-board map with all the fucking traps.

There a guide to MTP style pole poking trap design?

OgreBattle wrote:There a guide to MTP style pole poking trap design?

All of the AD&D trap books were MTP pole poking traps.

-Username17

are there any OSSR of these on the Den?

Here's a classic.

The 5e discussion of Amazon sales rank made me curious - PF Core Book (listed as a #1 seller in Pathfinder Books) is a #35 in Gaming, directly behind Curse of Strahd (#34), well behind Guildmaster's Guide to Ravinica (#30), Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (#16), and the top 4: Player's Handbook, Dungeonmaster's Guide, Monster Manual and Xanthar's Guide.

Not exactly a comprehsive indicator of how well 2e is doing but rather interesting that for the 3rd party kickstarter legendary games is doing for an adventure path called Aegis of empires it seems that out of the 3 options (1e pathfinder, 2e pathfinder and 5e D&D) 2e is doing the worst (at the time of writing this both 131 backers for 1e pathfinder and 5eD&D with 2e pathfinder at only 93 backers)

As I said not a comprehensive indicator but does line up with other things I've heard and not exactly a great look for your edition when it is being beaten out by the previous one.

Paizo's going to remake Kingmaker and apparently they'll be dual statting it for PF2 and D&D 5e. Trying to convert a few 5e players probably, but it says something about 5e's dominance.

What should a Pathfinder 2e be aiming to accomplish?

I think just cleaning up rules conflicts and re-organizing content of PF1 would've been fine, adjusting feats and so on like what Pathfinder was to D&D3.5 was to D&D3. Have a Player's Handbook where the Alchemist everyone likes is right there.

OgreBattle wrote:What should a Pathfinder 2e be aiming to accomplish?

To get another 10 years of money out of its players.

But really. From the outset, the PF business model was: (1) make an off-brand D&D game, (2) crank out content for that game. After a decade, it's time to do step 1 again so they can recycle a bunch of content for step 2.

I don't think reorganization & cleanup would be enough to sustain PF2 for 10 years. Pathfinder got its start because it was billed as a "fixed" version of D&D 3e. Similarly, PF2 at least needs to pretend like it's a big fix for PF1 in order to dig its roots in. Rebooting the game engine & rewriting the content would have been the right decision if the PF2 developers were good at either of those things.

For a reboot of PF to work you'd need a bigger change than 3.0 to 3.5 I think. Also you'd need someone with a vision and a better way of handling conflicts than Paizo - you can see failing to remove/change something which doesn't work in various places in their work, I've mentioned the kineticist as an obvious one before, or more recently there's the SF cover rules from their FAQrata:

How do I adjudicate the rules of cover when they provide counterintuitive results?

For example, given the rules for determining cover as written, two creatures in a 5-foot-wide corridor would have cover from one another, even with no intervening obstacles.

First and foremost, the GM can usually quickly decide whether a creature has cover based on the circumstances of the encounter. Common sense rules the day!

If the GM is unsure, they can use the rules for measuring cover provided in the Core Rulebook. For these purposes, a measuring line that passes along a wall (but not a creature) is considered to pass through a square or border that provides cover.

- note that despite acknowledging the problem in the first sentence they don't actually fix it.

OgreBattle wrote:What should a Pathfinder 2e be aiming to accomplish?

I think just cleaning up rules conflicts and re-organizing content of PF1 would've been fine, adjusting feats and so on like what Pathfinder was to D&D3.5 was to D&D3. Have a Player's Handbook where the Alchemist everyone likes is right there.

Shouldn't that be "Pathfinder 3E", then? 2E already exists and put the Alchemist in its Player Handbook, although they completely destroyed the excellent class they built in 1E.

Looking forward to seeing how my Chiurgeon Alchemist works as the party healer. If Fall of Plaguestone is as bad as I hear, we'll all be dead by next session. (The first fight had me at Dying 3 by the second round.)

TOZ wrote:Looking forward to seeing how my Chiurgeon Alchemist works as the party healer. If Fall of Plaguestone is as bad as I hear, we'll all be dead by next session. (The first fight had me at Dying 3 by the second round.)

As the main party healer he's pretty bad, since you want to use your extracts for buffing and such. Get a wand of cure light wounds or two and heal between fights. Otherwise heal by helping kill the enemies faster than they can damage the party.

magnuskn wrote:As the main party healer he's pretty bad, since you want to use your extracts for buffing and such.

2E alchemists don't have extracts, do they? Do you mean "infused reagents"?

hogarth wrote:

magnuskn wrote:As the main party healer he's pretty bad, since you want to use your extracts for buffing and such.

2E alchemists don't have extracts, do they? Do you mean "infused reagents"?

Whoops, sorry. I thought TOZ was talking about an 1E alchemist. 2E alchemists are trash.

TOZ wrote:Looking forward to seeing how my Chiurgeon Alchemist works as the party healer.

He won't.

Well, anyone can be out-of-combat healer thank to the medecine skill, because [insert incoherent rambling about how infinite healing with wand is lame, while infinite healing with skill is awesome]. So you can be a great out-of-combat healer, as can be Random NPC #3 and his dog.

To be a good in-combat healer, you need the Heal spell. And maybe the positive canalization. You have neither.